High priestesses were familiar figures. They presided over the worship of great mother goddesses like Isis and Cybele; officiated in the imperial Roman cult of the emperor; ran the temples of goddesses like Demeter, Kore, and Athena. And these were not merely ceremonial positions. Like high church office today, they involved enormous worldly as well as spiritual power, not the least because they included control over immense amounts of donated money. This money could be lent or used as endowments; it could fund the building of temples and palaces; it could sponsor both religious festivals and secular ones such as athletic games. And money worked then as it does now. Like commercial lobbying and sponsorship in our own time, financial largesse created enormous influence in political life.
The most famed such priestesses of Maryam's time were the Vestal Virgins in Rome. The six who served at any one time were elite women consecrated to the service of Vesta, the goddess who guarded the hearth of Rome. The eternal flame in her honor symbolized not only the Roman people but also male virility.
This last detail seems somewhat ironic, since the Vestals were indeed physical virgins, at least in principle. But any comparison with convents and nuns should be put aside. These highly educated women were the most liberated in the world of their time. They wielded extensive legal powers, including the right to grant pardons, a right belonging to only one other person: the emperor himself. Their most influential role was as the executors of the emperors' wills and guardians of other important legal documents like treasury and military records. This made the Vestals vital to the smooth succession of power from one emperor to the next. It also ensured huge legacies for them as beneficiaries of the wills. They lived in sumptuous luxury, with the kind of perks—the best seats at the Coliseum, imperial-level bodyguards—familiar to chief executives of major corporations today.
At the other end of the scale, women were also active in the far more spartan form of contemplative life we now think of as monasticism. The best known such movement at the time was not the relatively small, men-only Essene group down on the shores of the Dead Sea, but the far more widespread and influential Therapeutics, a Jewish monastic movement whose largest community was in Egypt, on the shores of Lake Mareotis near Alexandria.
Therapeutic communities were made up of both women and men who lived, practiced, and worshipped on equal terms, calling each other "brother" and "sister." Begun in the first century B.C. by Greek-speaking Judeans who had fled the Hasmoneans and settled in Egypt, they had established communities throughout the Middle East by Maryam's time. The women among them were mainly widows or had left their husbands to take up the contemplative life. They were known as virgins and daughters of Miriam, and one of their main hymns was Miriam's exultant song of freedom after the crossing of the Red Sea in Exodus.
The movement's name was as suggestive two thousand years ago as it is today. These monastics were as famed for their skill in herbs and healing as were their counterparts in the cult of Isis. But the therapy was not just physical; it was also psychological, and above all spiritual.
The Therapeutics were gnostics—literate and philosophically sophisticated, with a highly developed sense of metaphor. They saw the mystical union of the soul with the divine as both a spiritual marriage and a form of rebirth: the soul was reborn through union with its divine mother Hochma, Wisdom, whom they called "The Eternal Virgin."
When Jesus called on his followers to abandon blood ties of family and see each other as brothers and sisters, he undoubtedly had the Therapeutic example in mind. And a community of sisters formed around Maryam in a village like Ein Kerem would have been very much in the Therapeutic tradition: both contemplative and activist, alongside the world rather than in retreat from it.
They would have had a strong core of founders: not only Maryam herself, but those other women who took the road to Golgotha, and who were, if all too briefly, acknowledged as apostles. The gnostic text Pistis Sophia for example—literally, Faith Wisdom—which shows Jesus teaching the apostles as the child and messenger of Wisdom, has not twelve apostles present, but seventeen. Maryam, the Magdalene, Salome, and Martha and her sister Mary are gathered together on equal terms with the twelve men. And of course the gospel of Mary shows the Magdalene teaching the male apostles.
Like the Therapeutic women, the women in Maryam's community would have considered themselves daughters of Miriam—or rather, in the Aramaic, daughters of Maryam. For if Jesus was the spiritual child of Wisdom, he was also the earthly child of Maryam. He could be seen as having two mothers—or the two mothers, the spiritual and the earthly, could be seen as one.
Eventually, this is exactly what would happen. Maryam would be seen as the flesh-and-blood manifestation of the great female divine, and worshipped as such. But that would be long after her death, not in her own time or in her own community. Like her son, she would have thought of herself not as divine, but as living in the spirit of the divine: a child of Wisdom, not Wisdom herself. Spirit had not yet been fused with physical presence.
In those first years of what has since been called "the Jesus movement," to be a follower of Jesus was not to worship him, but to work for what he preached: a spiritual renewal among Jews, a return to a purer ethic and an end to the politicization of the temple. His followers were Jews who believed in him as a sage and a prophet of Jewish renewal. They were not Christians, for Christianity as a faith separate from Judaism did not yet exist. Paul had not yet begun his travels and his letters. He had not yet acted on his epiphany on the road to Damascus.
Read Paul's letters—really read them, that is, with a fresh mind—and you realize what a brilliant organizer he was. They could be the prototype for the correspondence of a modern political organizer, or even for a sales executive trying to motivate his staff. Most of them start by thanking those who have made outstanding efforts in the recent past, singling out the most active and the most financially generous for special mention. Next, the letters go on to outline how much work is still to be done. Then comes an account of Paul's own trials and tribulations. And finally, a Pauline sermon, clearly intended to inspire and rouse the troops to renewed effort.
But what is most notable for a modern reader is how many of those Paul singles out for special mention are women. There is Phoebe, the deacon of the congregation of Cenchrea, who carries Paul's letter to the Romans and whom he introduces as his patron. Junia in Rome is "foremost among the apostles." Prisca, Julia, Persis, Euodia, Synteche are all hailed as fellow workers, praised for their efforts in spreading the message. Prisca is the leader of a house church—all the early churches were inside private estates and homes—as are Lydia of Thyatira and Nympha of Laodicea. In fact, of the twenty-eight people Paul specifically praises in his letters, ten are women.
Women took leading roles in early Christianity. And we have more than Paul's testimony. In the Acts of the Apostles, the head of the Ebionite church in Jerusalem—the main Palestinian Jewish group that saw Jesus as the messiah—is Mary the mother of John Mark, and it is to her that Peter comes to announce that he's been freed from prison by an angel. Later, in the Acts of Paul and Thecla, a popular collection of Pauline stories, Paul is outshone by the aristocratic Thecla, who renounces the wealth and security of an arranged marriage for the far riskier life—at that time, at any rate—of an evangelist.
"In Christ there is no male or female," Paul wrote in his letter to the Galatians, and throughout the first, second, and third centuries, early Christian women took him at his word. They became priests, prophets, preachers, deacons, and even bishops, on a par with and often outdoing their male counterparts.
Despite themselves, theologians like Tertullian seemed stunned into admiration. "These heretical women, how audacious they are!" he wrote. "They have no modesty. They are bold enough to teach, to engage in argument, to enact exorcisms, to undertake cures, and even to baptize!"
Among the most audacious were the trio of renowned prophets at the forefront of the widespread Montanist movement, which bega
n in Asia Minor—now Turkey—in the second century. Their names, lyrically beguiling, were Priscilla, Quintilla, and Maximilla. Under their leadership, the movement focused on ecstatic prophecy and healing, nourishing such charismatic women that Tertullian's barely concealed admiration eventually got the better of him. He joined the Montanist group in the north African city of Carthage, where he wrote: "We have among us a sister who has been favored with gifts of revelation, which she experiences in the Spirit by ecstatic vision amidst the sacred rites of the Lord's day in church. She converses with angels, and sometimes even with the Lord. She both sees and hears mysterious communications. Some men's hearts she discerns, and she obtains directions for healing for such as need them."
Like the Therapeutics before them, the Montanists honored Eve as a seeker after knowledge, Miriam as a prophet, and Sophia as the feminine divine; in one of their oracles, Jesus appears to Priscilla in the form of a woman and "puts Wisdom"—Sophia—inside her. But other charismatic movements like the Valentinians and the Carpocratians focused as much on Jesus' earthly mother as on his spiritual one, gradually fusing Maryam and Sophia into the feminine divine. When the main teacher of the Carpocratian group, Marcellina, began to reveal secret teachings she had received from Maryam, Salome, and Martha, it would be only a small step to singling out Maryam not just for veneration, but for worship.
Men could not participate in the rites and rituals of the Kolyridian movement, which formed in the early third century and rapidly spread throughout the eastern Mediterranean. Only women could do so. This fact alone would make the Kolyridians perhaps the most intriguing of all the early Christian groups. But there was far more.
Their name came from the Greek word kolyris, a small flatbread or barley cake baked and eaten as an offering in a ritual as old as civilization itself. Bread still plays a central sacramental role both in Judaism, with the Sabbath challah and the Passover matzo, and in Christianity, with the Eucharist wafer, but in ancient societies, its meaning was far more down to earth. It was offered to the great virgin goddesses of fertility—fruitfulness offered in the hope of more.
Sometimes, ritual breads or cakes were made in the shapes of human genitalia, both female and male, in a clear linkage of fertility of the earth and human fertility. If this seems exotic, consider that some such rituals still survive as customs. Haman-taschen, for instance—"Haman's
ears" in Yiddish—are the triangular poppy seed pastries eaten at Purim, the feast that celebrates Esther saving the Israelite people from the Persian king Ahasureus and his evil advisor Haman. One look at the dark seeds bursting out of their pastry envelope and you need no Freud to figure out the sexual symbolism. The name Esther, after all, is the Hebrew form of Ishtar. It seems appropriate, then, that Ishtar is one of the "guests" featured in a vivid modern expression of this ancient fertility rite: artist Judy Chicago's room-size installation The Dinner Party. First shown in 1979, the large triangular dinner table has thirty-nine flamboyantly sexual ceramic place settings, each named for a celebrated woman.
We know that the Kolyridian breads were not erotically shaped, or critics like Epiphanius, the fourth-century bishop of Salamis who took it on himself to catalog all the known "heresies" of his time, would have leaped gleefully all over the fact. "But bread it was," says classical scholar Stephen Benko, "the 'fruit of Demeter,' sacred to Artemis, Minerva, Juno, and all the great fertility goddesses of the ancient world. For bread has an awesome relationship to Gaia, earth, in whose 'womb' the seed is planted to multiply, grow, and become a life-giving element. In the sacred mystery of bread, every woman could view herself as possessing a portion of the creative power of the gods, for in every act of intercourse, conception, and birth, the sowing of the seed, the miracle of life and death, is repeated."
The Kolyridian goddess was no longer Artemis or Juno, however, nor Isis or Ishtar or Cybele. It was Maryam. They had taken the logical next step in the progression from Isis to Hochma to Sophia, and closed the gap between the earthly and spiritual mothers. Maryam was the mother of a divine son. She was thus the source of the divine, and had to be divine in her own right—the last and ultimate manifestation of the great mother.
As a result, the Kolyridians would play an ironic dual role in the development of Christianity. On the one hand, they made the new religion far more acceptable to people who worshipped other manifestations of the great mother, and who could not imagine a world without the presence of the female divine. On the other, their very success held the seed of their downfall. As the universal Catholic church gained power in Rome, it could not deny the power of the virgin goddess; it could, however, co-opt and limit it. Maryam and Sophia would be separated again—the fusion defused, as it were. Maryam would become holy but not divine, while an asexual version of Sophia, the Holy Spirit, would become the third element in what many gnostics had seen as the original trinity of mother, father, and son.
That gnostic view would be branded heresy and suppressed, which is almost certainly why we have no surviving gospel of Maryam, even though several were surely written. There were hundreds of apocryphal texts in circulation between the second and the fourth centuries. Many were the popular novels of their time, filling the gaps in the four New Testament gospels with vivid imagination. We can still read gospels named after minor New Testament characters like Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, relating the life and death of Jesus from these characters' points of view. Even Pontius Pilate gets his apocryphal say in numerous texts of his own. And of course the Magdalene stars in the gnostic gospel of Mary. It is hard to imagine, then, that Maryam did not get to shine in her own right.
Is it really conceivable that a community of women living with her—anyone living with her, in fact, even if it was John—would not record her memories and thoughts? They would have been hungry for the kind of detail of Jesus' childhood that only his mother could provide, let alone for the teachings of the woman who taught him as she now taught them. They would have heard her voice as that of Wisdom. Her words would have been memorized, passed on to others, and eventually recorded in writing, albeit filtered through the dual lens of reverence and legend, to become sacred texts for movements such as the Carpocratians and the Kolyridians.
Some scholars have speculated that traces of Maryam gospels do appear here and there: in the passages of Matthew and Luke that feature her, for instance, and in gnostic "infancy gospels" like those of James and Thomas. But if so, they are indeed mere traces. One can barely hear the voice of the real woman behind them, the woman long dead by the time these accounts were written.
But that doesn't mean her voice did not survive.
We can still hear it, not in a gospel of Maryam, but in the surviving gnostic gospels, several of which were very likely written by women, given their active role in the early church. In fact it is all but impossible to imagine that one text in particular could have been written by anyone but a woman.
"Thunder, Perfect Mind" is written in a woman's voice. It is the voice of the female divine in all its wondrous and awesome paradox. Some read it as the voice of Wisdom, others of Eve, yet others as the voice of Maryam herself. I suspect it is better read as all three, for that is the point. The speaker transcends division to create a harmonious, dynamic interplay of opposites. She is, she seems to be saying, all women, all experience.
"Hear me," she insists. And since her words are an oracle rather than a gospel, they were originally intended to be recited out loud rather than read silently. Chant these extracts, even sing them if you dare, and it is almost as though you can see Maryam smiling in recognition:
Look upon me, you who reflect on me,
and you hearers, hear me.
You who are waiting for me, take me unto yourselves
and do not banish me from your sight . . .
Do not be ignorant of me anywhere or any time.
Do not be ignorant of me.
For I am the first and the last.
I am the honored one and the scorned one.
I am the whore and the holy one.
I am the wife and the virgin.
I am the mother and the daughter.
I am the members of my mother.
I am the barren one
and many are her sons.
I am she whose wedding is great,
and I have not taken a husband.
I am the midwife and she who does not bear.
I am the solace of my labor pains.
I am the bride and the bridegroom,
and it is my husband who begot me.
I am the mother of my father
and the sister of my husband,
and he is my offspring . . .
I am the knowledge of my inquiry,
and the finding of those who seek after me,
and the command of those who ask of me,
and the power of the powers in my knowledge
of the angels sent at my word,
and of gods in their seasons by my counsel,
and of spirits of every man who exists with me,
and of women who dwell within me . . .
Hear me in gentleness, and learn of me in roughness.
I am she who cries out,
and I am cast out upon the face of the earth.
I prepare the bread and my mind within.
I am the knowledge of my name.
I am the one who cries out,
and I listen . . .
In a way, Maryam was fortunate to die when she did, some twenty years before the outbreak of the four-year uprising that would culminate in the Romans burning down the Jerusalem temple in 70 A.D. In that fire, the world she knew would be utterly consumed, and the new one that would come into being would certainly have dismayed her with its divisiveness. Faith would be separated from people, people from land, and perhaps most tragically, people from people. For if any single event can be said to lead directly to the establishment of Judaism and Christianity as two separate religions, it was the destruction of the temple.
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